


Broken Souls

by TemporaryUniverse



Category: Criminal Minds
Genre: Angst galore, Character Study, Episode: s02e15 Revelations, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-22
Updated: 2016-10-22
Packaged: 2018-08-24 00:27:57
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 880
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8349097
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TemporaryUniverse/pseuds/TemporaryUniverse
Summary: Long-ish drabble. Set during season 2, ep. Revelations. Inside Reid's mind during the events of Revelations, bit of a character study. Minor spoilers for seasons 1 and 2.





	

_You are stronger than him. He cannot break you._

The phrase echoed in his hazy mind, but he could not seem to draw strength from it, though that had been what it was intended to do. No, instead the words reminded him of his weakness. Gideon had told him he was strong, that he couldn't be broken, but that was the farthest thing from the truth.

The truth was that even before he met Tobias Hankel, he was broken.

The first time he broke was with the first humiliation in high school, when he was nine, and the other students decided he should spend the night in a locker. Still he refused to crack under every uttered insult, every thrown punch, every laughed taunt. Even when he was tied naked to the goal post on the football field, surrounded by bullies who were bigger, older, and stronger, he managed to hold on. Somehow, he endured those torturous years, he kept himself from breaking completely, gluing the pieces back together, maybe not very neatly, but still whole.

The second time he broke was when he was ten. He found a note on the kitchen table. His dad had packed his suitcases and vanished, running away from a schizophrenic wife and his freak of a son. He had seen it coming though, his dad said goodbye a couple of times, and walked out more then once, but he had always come back a few days later with an apology on his tongue. Until that last time when he hadn't, when the letter was left waiting, a little boy left waiting with it.

The third time was when he was eleven and his mom had tried to kill him. It really wasn't her fault. It was just her paranoid mind playing tricks on her, but it hurt, even though she hadn't done any damage, it physically hurt to know that the knife in her hand had come close to ending his life, that his own mother was capable of that.

The fourth time he broke was at his high school graduation when he was twelve. He had been sporting a black eye while giving his valedictorian speech, courtesy of the football team. He had crossed the stage to receive his diploma and smiled at the crowd because he was so happy to finally be leaving the torture, so happy to be moving on with his life and education. But, there was a face missing in the audience, his mother, the one person he cared about more than anyone, more than himself, was not there to see the proudest moment of his short life. And that broke his heart.

The fifth time he broke was when he turned eighteen. When he signed the forms and later walked into the house with two strangers by his side, and let them take his mother, wanted them to take her. He sent her to the one place she didn't want to go, where she could never be happy, all because he was a coward and didn't know how to help her anymore. Just like his father. He had two doctorates already, was starting his third, and yet he couldn't be bothered to take care of his own mother.

He broke a sixth time on the day he killed a man. It had been necessary, he knew, there had been lives at stake, lives that counted on him understanding the plan, on him taking the perfect shot despite having failed his firearm qualifications. Gideon had been proud of him, somehow it didn't feel right, that someone was proud of him for ending another human being's life. He still glued the piece back on as best he could, but he didn't feel quite as complete as before, as if something were still missing.

The seventh time was when Elle left. He still felt guilty, the edges of the piece were still jagged, didn't fit quite right this time, because he should have seen something. He had been in that hotel room with her, watching her drink on the job, feeling her own brokenness radiating out from her, and yet, he did nothing to help his friend. And now she was gone. Some friend he was.

Now he was tied to a chair, his own fractured soul reflected in the eyes of the young, tortured man standing in front of him. If things had gone a different way, if his mother hadn't needed him to hold himself together so he could care for her, if he hadn't bothered to care about disappointing Gideon, he might have shattered completely. He could be Tobias, captive to his own mind, unable to pick the pieces back up. He had stayed standing for this long, but now, with the sweet release of drugs coursing through his veins, and the pain he was suffering at the hands of a killer, he was finally falling apart. All the glue that he had used to keep himself whole was now disintegrating with the influence of the Diluadid. The existing cracks that he had previously mended were being pried open, and spiderweb of fractures revealing themselves, criss-crossing his being. He briefly wondered if he would ever be able to be fixed.

He could be broken.

Gideon was wrong.

**Author's Note:**

> Hmmm. I'm not sure what I think about this, my first try at a drabble piece. Not my usual type of thing, but Revelations was an intense episode and I needed to do something for it. Also some of this is my own headcanons for Reid's childhood, I wish we knew more about him as a kid. He's super cute.
> 
> Pretty please review?


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